


There's more than Surviving

by Darkestwolfx



Series: More to Living than Surviving [1]
Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, the long reach
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:56:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23065846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkestwolfx/pseuds/Darkestwolfx
Summary: Maybe surviving was the easy part. A trilogy exploring the difference between Surviving and Living. Spoilers/episode tag to 'The Long Reach'.
Relationships: Jeff Tracy/Lucille Tracy, Tracy Family - Relationship
Series: More to Living than Surviving [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1657675
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	1. Part I - Surviving

**Author's Note:**

> This is my next and (for the moment) last tag onto ‘The Long Reach’. I know it’s taken a while to get this up as well, and I apologise for that!
> 
> So, this one is a Trilogy of pieces and it’s based on one of my favourite quotes from the episode! I’ve played around with my writing style a little in this one to (I think, anyhow, but let me know your opinions) suit this piece a little more as I had the perfect idea in my head of how I wanted the timing and the language and the to all sync – yes, sorry I went a bit poetry terms there, but they really do influence my writing sometimes. Each piece has its own kind of style too.
> 
> Let me know your thoughts and I hope you all enjoy!
> 
> P.S. The title came from the first quote, and the second quote is the from TAG, and the one which inspired all this.

_“There is a difference between living and surviving. If you do what you need, you’re surviving. If you do what you want, you’re living.” – Unknown._

_\-----_

_“How did you do it, Dad? How did you last so long?”_

_“Surviving was easy. How did I last? Thinking of all of you. I knew you’d find a way. I never gave up hope.”_

* * *

* * *

Summary: Maybe surviving was the easy part.

Word Count: 1992

* * *

~ **Part I – _Surviving_ **~

“There. We. Go!” With a flourish the last of the image appeared in all of its shining glory. Words may not be the man’s strong point, but Jeff couldn’t deny that he was almost as artistic as Lucy – a department in which Jeff himself was lacking the talent for. “We’re a _ll_ done.”

Finally, he was allowed to open his eyes and really see what this was all about.

Jeff blinked. It didn’t change the view. Lee stared back at him from the top of the LT – Lunar Transport for a proper name, but Lee had decided everything _had_ to have far better names if they were going to be here for a while. It was like the base; Alfa apparently wasn’t good enough – it was part of the NATO phonetic alphabet, and not really a name. It had taken some time to decide between Alicia and Alfie.

Safe to say, they went with Alfie.

“Well?”

Jeff was trying to think of the best way to say it. It wasn’t that the artistry was a problem, it just wasn’t what he had been expecting.

“The flames are… well, a bit _much_ … don’t you think?”

“Not at all!” Lee decreed, jumping down from the towering wheels. _But then,_ Jeff thought, _he would say that._ His friend had just spent the past two hours painstakingly painting them to the exact detail. “Looks like a proper explorers transport.”

 _Maybe_. He’d reserve his judgement on that.

“Hopefully we won’t need it for much more than little errands.”

Lee shrugged. “Well, if we do, we do. But if we don’t, it will still look cool!”

“I don’t think that’s the _main_ point. It’s meant to be practical.”

“And the flames don’t make it any less practical, Jeff. I’m thinking of putting some on my new jet pack design.” Lee remarked, off-hand, like usual. “No one said practical couldn’t look cool.”

No. That was true. But ‘cool’ probably turned a few more eyes away from the intended purposes… or maybe that was just him, thinking as he was about his Mother and Lucy, and the family they hoped to start soon.

“What about those preliminary designs of yours? Pretty cool, _practical_ rocket, you’ve got there.”

“Yes, alright, Lee, point made.”

Lee laughed, brash and loud. At least their quarrels were always in good humour. They were too good friends for anything else.

Still, it was good to get back into the base, back in with the truly safe and breathable air. The garage was likely fine too, but they never took that risk in the tunnels, what with it being so close to the outside range of the moon, and whatever neighbours may choose to cross their planetary backyard. They had plenty of work which needed completing too, not to mention that big thing called _their book_. As of yet, still untitled, of course. What with all the titles Lee thought up, you’d have thought that would be easy, but oh no.

Yet, that was what they sat down to do. And about time too, Jeff thought. The whole thing was practically finished, but it needed some serious editing and proofreading. Which was his task, of course. So, whilst he completed that, he’d left Lee with the job of title creating – ideally looking for something better than the original draft title: _Lee and Jeff’s Ultimate Guide to Survival in Space._

Lee thought that was cool; Jeff thought that was a bit of a mouthful.

“So how about DDM?”

“What?” That didn’t indicate much at all. “For the book title?”

“No, no, our defense system.”

Of course. Because their draft wasn’t due at all soon, nor was it like it was currently – _still_ – title-less.

“And what does that stand for?”

“Debris Destroying Machine!”

Jeff shook his head. Lee was intent on naming the system they’d created _before_ the Leonid's arrived. Why, Jeff wasn’t sure, but he was happy enough to oblige at first, for it passed the time a little. Now he was obliging in the hope that completing that would allow them to focus on the real task at hand.

“No.”

“I thought that one was good.”

“I don’t know, I feel like I’ve heard it before…”

“Ok…” Lee sounded a little disappointed at that. However, Jeff knew his friend would always take that on as a challenge, keep trying to find the way to be better.

Jeff put his attention back onto the pages. He still had hundreds to go.

“Orbiting Defense System..?”

“You made that one up on the spot, didn’t you?”

“Hell yeah.”

“Hell no.”

“Good, I didn’t really like that one either.”

He let a chuckle pass his lips again, before retrieving his pen. “So about this opening line here-”

“Oh ok- I got!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. OMDS.”

He let the pen go. That was definitely not a contender for the title of the book, so… Well, this wasn’t going anywhere for a moment, not until Lee had another name down. And Jeff could run with that. For a minute longer. Then they needed to talk properly about survival, without Lee picking a string of words out of thin air to try and fit with a ‘cool’ acronym.

“OMDS?”

“Orbital Meteor Defense System. Yeah?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Jeff. That one was getting there.”

“Ok, so how about ODDM?”

Lee frowned.

“For?”

“Orbiting Debris Defense Module?”

“I can settle with that.”

“At last! Now can we please finish chapter seven before we do _any_ thing else?”

“Right! Ur… what was chapter seven about again?”

Jeff laughed. That was Lee all over! The man was a far better talker than he was a reader. Always had been.

Chapter Seven was meant to be the guide of practical solutions to any dangerous or just incoming items in general, be in debris or meteors, or something unknown. Be it something affecting the very ground upon which you stood, or the infinite cradle of stars holding you. Together, they’d written a very coherent section on how to _survive_ almost anything.

(Of course, Jeff did have to strike out the part about painting artistic flames to make your equipment look cooler, especially just in the case the worst happened. He didn’t think that would be massively appreciated by their publishers as advice from well-named space explorers. That would be like a well-known celebrity suddenly telling younger viewers it was okay to do whatever such thing they thought was, and thus causing a nightmare for parents. No, it would not be well received and so Jeff removed it without Lee being any wiser… at the time, at least. He personally hadn’t wanted to be the one dealing with the dog-eared explanation for _why_ painting artistic flames to look cool was a good survival technique and worthy of being published for ages to follow).

Besides all that… palaver over that particular section, it did remain a fact that he (and Lee) wrote the guide to surviving in Space. And clearly it was one which did work, for he’d built Thunderbird Five with all those lessons in mind and she was still standing strong-

- _he hoped_.

Jeff longed to be back in the same galaxy to see it, to just see it orbit past him, and see the moon he recognised which had once been his home, and know there was _hope_.

He had hope, of course. It was in their survival guide, on around page ten; _“whatever happens, never give up hope.”_ It was the motto he’d taught to his sons, which they’d soon adapted into part of the International Rescue unspoken code of operation (or the ‘IRUCO’ as Gordon had taken to calling it, but Jeff struck a line through that in his mind too, just as easily as he had his and Lee’s book’s drafts.)

It still made him laugh though, those little things, respectively.

Here he was, working his way through everything he remembered being in the survival guide _he_ wrote, and every point seemed to bring him back to his sons, or International Rescue, or the Island, or _home_. It was as if both worlds had become inexplicably woven between each other.

Maybe it was because he’d always taught to his boys (sometimes with other words or phrasings) so many of the lessons which appeared in that book… or maybe it was because the memories of his boys were helping him to survive. He wasn’t exactly sure, and in the earliest days, he hadn’t had the time to dedicate towards trying to work it out. He’d just been working his way through his survival guide.

Working his way through the list of priorities he and Lee had made for it;

  * _Find yourself a sustainable source of breathable air_
  * _Keep a check of your stockpiles_
  * _Always keep your tools to hand_
  * _Always be mindful of the landscape around you_
  * _Memorise what you must always have on your person_



There were many, many more, but he had them all memorised. And he worked through them.

And just like that, his survival seemed to be the easiest task at hand.

Of course, he thought for a while he’d been relatively lucky with where he ended up. It was a stable planetoid and the Zero X had crashed in something of a ‘good’ way. He worked every day until he was set up, his survival all but ensured for a while. And when that was done, he thought. Thought whether there was anything he’d missed – besides the obvious, of course. The things he was really missing, were the things he couldn’t have.

So, he set himself up a base, and he tried to channel the skills Lucy and Lee had never been able to really teach him. It wasn’t perfect. It was lumpy. That was what Lee would say – words, weren’t his thing, remember? Lucy would say it lacked shading and texture. They’d both be right, and he knew they’d be right. Beyond that, he knew what it looked like. It would be Lee who said it first though, guaranteed. ‘ _Did one of your boys do that, Jeff?’._ And, he didn’t care much for the thought right now; it made him smile, criticism or not.

It was _meant_ to be the Island. Maybe one day it would be if he kept practising, kept going and tried to remember all the things Lucy had tried to tell him about art. Heck, Virgil had picked it up better than him and he’d been married to the woman- no, known Lucy, far longer than the middle child had been alive. So that said something.

His artwork might not be good enough, but his experience in space was going to be.

So he lived in his base, tried to keep himself busy by noting down eventual edits for the book (which had eventually been named _‘The Space Survival Guide’,_ with a long battle over taking out the word _ultimate_ ), and in trying to draw a version of the Island that Lucy and Lee would be proud of.

And he _survived_.

He never let himself be fooled, though: he lived ready for worse to come, but made sure to remember every word of that book.

It was a good thing he’d spent so long writing it with his best friend (and that his best friend was bonkers enough to put in things which Jeff would have to proof read a thousand times over to ensure _‘yes, the publishers are safe to read this’_ ).

In some sense, Jeff supposed _surviving_ , surviving after writing all that and going to Mars and living on the Moon, and being a part of International Rescue, and being thrown out into far away space… Yes, _surviving_ after all that was actually the easy part.

The harder part, would be the question of how long?

Not, ‘how long could be survive?’; oh no, because he could eek that out to some degree. More the question of: ‘how long could _he **last**?’_


	2. Part II - Lasting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He could survive; could he last?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this is the longest and most poetic of the three parts! Honestly, the amount of poetry I ended up writing for this chapter that I was like… I can’t keep all this in! I might post it as a separate piece, but it took away from the point of this trilogy (in my opinion).

_“There is a difference between living and surviving. If you do what you need, you’re surviving. If you do what you want, you’re living.” – Unknown._

* * *

_“How did you do it, Dad? How did you last so long?”_

_“Surviving was easy. How did I last? Thinking of all of you. I knew you’d find a way. I never gave up hope.”_

* * *

Summary: He could survive; could he last?

Word Count: 1692

* * *

* * *

*** Part II – _Lasting *_**

The days were no more than hours passing him by, going over his head and ticking onwards at speed, or not so… sometimes he was sure he must have missed years, and at other it felt like only minutes. It was hard to know which was to be believed.

He wanted to believe.

But the days were no more than hours passing him by and the minutes no more than stars he could no longer see.

He often thought he saw something, on the horizon. Something which made his heart race with hope and his chest pound with prospects of going home, of _living_ life as it was made to be lived.

But it was never any more than an asteroid or a flickering star, dying with no hope of recovery.

This was his world now, this desolate, vacant orbit.

It was beautiful, of course, but the beauty was still hard to see with despair sitting thick and heavy like a rain cloud waiting to pour, waiting to take all the hope and years he had left.

He’d managed to _survive._

That still wasn’t a problem.

The problem was what he missed.

 _His_ home, his beautiful, wonderful island.

 _His_ poor Mother and his best friends.

His _boys_.

His boys who were far too young to be without him, especially little Alan. His boys who weren’t ready to be left alone, like chicks who had yet to learn to fly.

It wasn’t just the things he missed that dragged him down either. It was the prospects. He could keep up hope that he would see home and his boys again, yet the prospect of that happening, the chances… even if he did survive long enough- he wouldn’t want his boys to come all this way to find him, and find a ghost living in a shell of the man they knew.

That was not possible.

The days were no more than hours passing him by like the Earth orbited the sun, or the comets raced passed the stars.

He had to keep going, he had to believe that one day he would go home. His boys would come and get him to bring him home-

- _he hoped_.

It was a hallucination, a dream, a figment of imagination. Part of him knew that, but it never helped to make it _feel_ any less _real._

It didn’t make Scott and Alan’s bright blue eyes any less reflective of his own.

It didn’t make Virgil and Gordon’s cheeky smiles any less like that of their Mother’s own.

It didn’t make John any less like a shining star, with his red hair and green eyes so like his Mother’s.

It didn’t make any of them less like his saviours.

His saviours and his sons, who received seeing him alive as well as much as he did seeing them.

Smiles and laughter and tears. A reunion that he’d seen many times over, each with variants a new, but a path always the same.

Sometimes who moved first was different; sometimes the first word to be spoken was different, but the movements were always the same.

Overjoyed, his boys would flood towards him, smiles on faces and arms opened wide. And he would open his own arms to receive them, his smile just as bright. He’d waited for this moment, he’d survived and lived on for this very moment.

And just when his boys reached his arms at-

_-last…_

_No, they never quite did.  
Which shouldn’t shock him,  
For in his right mind, he knew they weren’t there,  
But he couldn’t pass his days without throwing them a thought or care.  
And it shouldn’t shock him,  
For he knew he couldn’t hold them like he wished,  
But none of that mattered, for they were his sons, his boys, his world._

But even with all that wishful thinking and daydreaming, he couldn’t bring them here. He didn’t hold that power. He could magic up the images of everything he needed in his mind, he could make them almost feel tangible, make them sound as if they were only a whisper’s worth of distance from him… but it never changed the fact that they _weren’t._

 _Nothing_ changed _that_.

Not even…

When you knew how to survive like he did, there didn’t seem to be many problems presenting themselves. And yet, he faced the biggest challenge every day.

It wasn’t surviving that was a gruesome and gruelling task; wasn’t the challenge of surviving taking on the form of the cold, shadowy demon, that nipped at his skin and gnawed on his bones. No, the challenge, after all that, was lasting.

 _Lasting  
_ When everything he really wanted to see was so far away and untouchable, for the first time.

He refused to give up hope though.

If he could survive, he would make sure to _last._

He didn’t know how long he might be here, he didn’t know what might come, but he would weather the storm. He’d braved the hurricanes and tornados of Earth, and he would fight the meteor showers and debris storms up here with just as much bite and bark.

Every night he would dream and every day he would remember.

He’d dream of the Island and his family and he’d remember every detail of the land and their faces. He could picture them waking or sleeping, each and every one of them with crystal-clear levels of clarity.

Blue eyes, brown eyes and green.

Red hair, and blonde hair, brunette, grey and black.

There was an endless mix of colours swirling through his mind, which formed paintings of their own to the soft tunes of keys, mixing Sonata’s into Odes, and back again. Noises which he valued more now than he had before, little things and big things, which made a cacophony that would do an orchestra proud.

Laughter, and tears and pearls of happy smiles.

Adventures, and stories, and songs to be sung.

 _Every_ night, he would dream and _every_ day, he would remember.

After all, there was so much waiting for him… If only he could get back there, find a way.

It angered him, that he knew how to survive, but had no viable way home. That was all he needed: a way home. But he didn’t have one of those. So he was left with no choice but to remain here to the day came that was his-

_-last…_

_No, he’d thought of many ways,  
Many days had come that he thought his last,  
For with every job he did, each demanded he dare,  
But he’d made it through again and again, because home had been waiting there.  
And never did that day come,  
For he was still here standing tall and breathing,  
But none of that mattered, for alone he dwelt, the best world the one called ‘dreaming’._

So that never got him home, it never found him a way off this wretched rock, but it kept him alive.

Yes, he would have survived, probably until the day for him to finally die did rear its long-awaiting head. He would have survived, but likely as nothing more than a pale ghost, a shadow of the man Jeff Tracy had truly been. He knew everything there was to know about surviving, and there was one thing which he knew ensured it best.

It wasn’t in his and Lee’s book, but it damn right should have been. Back then, he hadn’t really known quite how important it was, he hadn’t had the same circumstances with which to test it;

_He’d been with a friend, not all alone.  
He’d been closer to Earth and he’d had a viable way home.  
He’d had a wife and a mother, not a family all grown.  
He’d been closer to Earth and somewhere people had known._

_Up here was cold, isolated, remote,  
Far from the blue, green and white hues of home.  
With nothing but remnants of what had been his life,  
And nothing to heal the bitter, stabbing strife._

_Earth was far, far away and here he lived alone,  
In a world which, well, was never going to be a home._

_He could survive, there was no question of that,  
But surviving was not living,  
It was ticking over, remaining,  
And life was about far more than merely lasting..._

It wasn’t in his and Lee’s book.

He’d re-write that at some point _when_ he got back. That book was written a long time ago, after all.

It wasn’t a case of _if,_ because he knew he could survive. Whatever the cost he would hold on, even if he couldn’t thrive. He had something to live for and that would be his drive; his hope and light on which he would rise.

He could survive, long enough, he could buy them all time.

It was a simple case of dreaming, of letting his mind wander free, or thinking about the things he’d lost, and the things that could one day be.

Jeff knew better than most the cost that survival could take, but he also knew he’d pay it willingly to live long enough to see that day.

People would ask, of course they would, ‘ _Jeff, how did you survive?’._ And he knew the answer would never be that which they would expect or likewise accept.

Yet he would always know it was the truth. He lived his every day, hour, minute, thinking of the things on Earth, from the smallest to the biggest.

He thought of every sunrise over the tallest mountain peaks; of every star the eye could see; of children’s story books and apple pie, and the family to whom he never got to say ‘ _goodbye_ ’.

And, _I love you._

He had five boys waiting for him down there, and a home, and a _life_.

If he knew how to survive, then he could keep going.

 _There was so much waiting for him_ … So he would last, by thoughts, by dreams, and the hope in his heart.

Yes… He would last long enough to say the words he never got to say.

He’d _survived_ , so far.

He’d find a way to _last_.

So he could find a way.


End file.
